Please see http://milinkovich.blogspot.com/2007/01/parallel-ip-approval s-for-incubating.html.
I've repeated the text below.
Parallel IP Approvals for Incubating Projects
I have some very good news for new projects at Eclipse. At the board meeting
last week, an important revision to the Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy
was approved. Under the new revision, projects which are in incubation ---
and which are clearly marking their webpages and downloads as such --- can
now start to have their IP submissions approved while they are working on
the code, rather than waiting for prior approval.

So how does this work? All projects still have to submit contribution
questionnaires. The difference is that once a CQ has been reviewed for
license compatibility, an incubating project will be authorized via IPzilla
to check in the code to CVS and start working on it.

IP due diligence will need to be completed before the project can ship
anything labeled as a release candidate or release.

Hopefully this will help us avoid past scenarios where new projects have had
to wait for a long time for IP approvals in order to get started!